


Leaving You Forward

by nostalgicatsea



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Closure, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Leaving Home, M/M, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 02:00:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21245636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea
Summary: It would be easy, staying here like this with Tony. But Steve knew he couldn't—because he had never taken the easy way out and because he loved Tony.





	Leaving You Forward

It had been a while since Steve was in town. His mother had moved back to Brooklyn when he was away at college and since then, Steve had had no reason to go back. Brooklyn was home; it was where he was originally from and where he was going to next, now that he was done with college, but this was where he had spent most of his adolescent years. Maybe he was a bit sentimental, a bit stuck in the past, but it was why he decided to make the move to Brooklyn alone, getting a day’s head start of Natasha, Sam, and Bucky.

He had arrived later than he had hoped. The sun was already setting, molten gold pooling at his feet as he made his way through the trees.

He knew that he had only a little while before the sun dipped entirely past the horizon; darkness came early at this time of year, thick and obscurant, and the flashlight on his phone would drain his battery rapidly if he wasn’t careful. He walked in bigger strides, opting not to soak in all the beauty around him, only thinking of the beauty that lay ahead.

It was quiet this far out of town, the only sounds accompanying him the mournful hoot of an owl and the rustle of leaves as a brisk wind skimmed the trees. The house, when it appeared beyond the last bend of trees like an apparition, was just as subdued. It looked empty, and as he called out Tony’s name, Steve wondered if he had made a mistake. It had been a few years after all, and Tony could have left.

They all had. Including Steve.

Steve’s insides churned uneasily with familiar, years-old guilt. He would never forget the way that Tony had looked at him as he left.

Nothing moved in the wake of his call. As the silence stretched on, the air seemed to grow heavier, weighed down with the stillness that came from absence; even the owl he had heard earlier seemed to have disappeared. He began to wonder if he should call out again when Tony appeared from behind the house, slinking around the corner with soundless, feline grace.

Their eyes locked and instantly Steve was all but seventeen again, heart pounding unevenly in his chest, painfully awkward in his skin, as he asked Tony out the day before Homecoming after years of pining. Autumn had come early that year, the streets thickly carpeted with fallen leaves and the air sharp with the hint of oncoming frost, and Tony had stood there, almost at the very spot he was standing now, a wrench in his right hand and dark grease stains smearing his cheek and shirt, more beautiful than their surroundings—more beautiful than anything Steve had ever seen. 

Tony looked virtually the same as he did then, honeyed skin and easy smile, handsome in a coltish way. As he ambled over, he ran his fingers through his unruly hair like he had done in high school, a gesture that he did by habit and most likely wasn’t fully aware of. The familiarity of the movement made Steve breathless with heartache. He wanted to reach out and touch Tony, to hold him in his arms like he used to and breathe him in, but he kept his hands at his sides instead.

“Hey, handsome. Fancy seeing you here,” Tony said. He spoke casually, almost lazily, but his eyes were bright and alert with happiness.

“Thought I’d drop by,” Steve said. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah? Got any good stories to tell?” Tony sat down on the grass, gesturing at Steve to do the same. “Big ragers, nasty hangovers...” A leaf fell gently into his lap, and his words tapered off. He moved to cradle it in his palms before he looked up at the trees, still mostly in their summer dresses although bursts of red and orange had started to bloom amongst the verdant green. His gaze sharpened as though he were seeing his surroundings for the first time. “It’s too early for you to be back. Why—”

“I graduated.”

Something flickered across Tony’s face, too quick to analyze. “You...”

“Graduated,” Steve said, and it felt like an apology more than anything. “This May.”

“Congrats.”

Tony’s face was unreadable.

_ Sorry_, he wanted to say_, _ but he knew that would make things worse.

“I can’t believe this.” Tony huffed out a laugh, changing tack, but his eyes still retained an unsettling blankness to them that Steve didn’t like. “I thought I’d be the one regaling you with tales of the wild college life, not the other way around.”

“Hey, I had a nice, quiet time at college. Peaceful even.”

But he knew what Tony meant. Tony had been destined for MIT since they were kids, whereas he hadn’t even been sure if he’d be able to go to college, what with money being tight and his mom sick again. Yet here he was, freshly graduated, summa cum laude, while Tony had stayed behind in this time-frozen town.

_ You could’ve left, you know. You should’ve left. There’s nothing for you here_, Steve thought, not for the first time.

Tony snorted and Steve was distracted from his thoughts for a moment. “Nice, quiet time. Just like middle school and high school, right? I swear, half the time I thought you liked getting beaten up. Couldn’t figure out whether you had a death wish or a kink.” His mouth tilted as he tried to keep a straight face. “Maybe both?”

“You know me so well,” Steve said dryly, but he was grinning widely. He had been worried throughout the entire ride over that too much time had passed and too much had changed between them after they had gone their separate ways, but it was easy talking to Tony, as if nothing had changed since high school.

And that was the problem right there, he knew. It would be so easy to step back into this, to pretend that things could work out just for a little while. As Tony looked at him, those brown eyes he loved so much so wide and incredibly young, Steve thought about how very easy it would be to forget everything and stay.

There was a time when he would have believed with all his heart that he could—or would have willed himself to do so—but not anymore.

“Never understood how you could’ve,” Steve said, putting those thoughts aside to focus on the here and now, on Tony. “Bucky, I get, but you...”

“I fell in love with you the first day you showed up in town,” Tony said simply, like it was the answer to everything. And once, he would have been embarrassed to say that, to be so direct, but this was old ground that they had trodden on many times before.

“Yeah, you told me. Black eye, broken nose, blood dripping from my mouth with Schmidt towering over me, and I was the prettiest thing you’d ever seen.”

“I think my exact words were that you were the most colorful, but we can go with that.”

Their hands were nearly touching. Steve could feel the millimeter or so separating them as if an electric current grazed the backs of their hands, and his awareness of that distance made the urge to touch Tony grow in intensity. He curled his hand into a fist instead, digging into the cool soil and feeling blades of grass pull up from the earth.

“We could’ve had years,” Steve said, and this too was ground they had covered before.

“Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve if we weren’t both idiots. We were a match made in heaven,” Tony said. “Anyway, we had one really good one, right? And years of being friends before that.”

But as they looked at each other, Steve couldn’t help but think about the years lost and the years that they would never have.

_ Tell me to stay, _ he thought for a fleeting second, but Brooklyn and Sam and Natasha, Bucky and his mother, stirred in the back of his mind, beckoning him, and he knew that that wasn’t what he wanted.

He was 22, after all, and in a year, he would be 23, then 24, then 25.

And Tony would stay 18 forever.

There was a tinge of sadness to Tony’s smile as though he could hear Steve’s thoughts, faint enough that had Steve been anyone else, he would have missed it. But he knew Tony with the intimacy of having spent years studying him, with the practiced eye of an artist and a friend, of someone who loved him before knowing anything about the world and ever since then, and he noticed it with ease.

“And that’s what counts, right?” Tony added. “That we had all the time we did get.”

“Yeah.”

There were people, he remembered, who dismissed Tony as immature, who froze him in the amber of their memories as someone whose childishness would follow him into adulthood, but they hadn’t had him entirely right. Youthful though he was, he was always rushing to the future, always light-years ahead of everyone else. If anything, there had been times when Steve thought that Tony had grown up too soon and much faster than he should have. Times when he had wondered when Tony would ever be the age he was supposed to be and no older or younger, before the accident happened a few weeks before college started.

“We had a good run,” Tony said quietly, and Steve wondered whether Tony knew what he had come to do and whether he would do it before he himself did. He wondered if Tony would be upset.

But he knew Tony the way Tony knew him, and Tony would see this as something that Steve should do even if Tony had as much right to do it too, if not more.

Tony had always been like that. He took what was his, but he gave everything else, and sometimes—many times—what should have belonged to him away too. And when it came to the people he loved, he always gave without expecting anything in return, and never was it more true than with Steve.

It was why they were in the situation they were in now. That, more than anything, made up Steve’s mind. 

“I came to say goodbye,” he said.

“I know,” Tony replied. “Knew it was the last time as soon as I saw you.”

“You’re not...”

“Upset?” Tony smiled, and Steve was relieved to see that it was genuine, absent of anything Tony would try to hide when it wasn’t.

“I didn’t—I don’t want to hurt you.” Yet again, he wanted to touch Tony and this time, he let himself. He cupped the side of Tony’s face, getting as close to him as he could without going through him, and made to smooth his thumb across his cheek. “I don’t know if you’re ready, but I thought maybe...”

_ You’d like to let go, _ he didn’t say.

Tony’s eyes fluttered shut and he leaned in as if he could feel Steve against his skin. “You, of all people, could never hurt me. You never once wanted to.” He put his hand over Steve’s cupped one, and Steve could pretend, as they were a hair’s width apart, that he could feel the calluses of Tony’s fingers, the warmth that Tony had always radiated when he was alive. “And you can’t do anything to me even if you did. Though I can possess _ you _ .” He paused, narrowing his eyes. “Maybe. I never tried. _ Should _I try? Now that I’m going, I’m thinking of all the lost opportunities here, goddammit.”

“Tony,” he cut in, laughing.

He wanted to hold Tony’s hand for real so badly, the way he used to when Tony got like this.

“Shhh. Think about Patrick Sway—no? Okay, how about _ Just Like Heaven_—you know what, I have an excuse for not being up-to-date on ghost movies. I’m dead,” Tony huffed before he grew serious again, just as Steve knew he would if he waited the nervous chatter out.

“Tony,” he said carefully. “Do you want to stay?”

This wasn’t any kind of life he wanted for Tony, utterly alone in a town where nothing ever happened except when he visited. Tony was movement and color, was life itself, and all Steve ever wanted was for him to be himself completely again, not a half-shade of who he was.

Tony moved away, and Steve let his hand fall to his side as he watched Tony bring up his legs and fold his arms over his knees, resting his chin on them.

“Seventh grade,” Tony began after a long silence, slowly like his mind was galaxies away. “Your mom was really sick.”

The sun was almost completely gone now. The world was in monochrome, everything awash in shades of blue and black, and Tony’s face was shadowed. For the first time Steve had known him like this, he looked distant, unreal, a part of the past Steve couldn’t reach.

“And seeing you then,” Tony said, “I just...I didn’t want you to be like that ever again. Not because of me. Not because of anyone or anything. That was the last thought I had before...you know.”

A bird took flight, mute except for one short, morose cry as it circled above them.

Tony watched it disappear over the treetops before speaking again, his words picking up speed. “Everyone left for college, and I knew you wouldn’t want to talk about it with anyone—you never do—and well, I told you once that I’d stick around as long as I could, as long as you needed me. And no matter what people say about me, I don’t—I don’t back out on promises like that.”

“I know.” 

“I had to make sure you were okay.” He finally turned to look at Steve. “You _ are _ okay,” he said, his eyes burning with faith, and it was more a statement than a question.

Steve thought of the past few years, the first year and then the years after that, once he transferred to the same college as Bucky. The way that he felt and remembered almost nothing that entire year after Tony had died, as if he had plunged into the ocean and fallen asleep in the ice, and how Tony’s presence grounded and comforted him then. The way that he had slowly but surely thawed. The way that Bucky was there just like the old times once he moved, and the way that he met Natasha and Sam and begun to live life again.

The way that he had been able to finally process what had happened because Tony gave him the time to do so on his own terms.

“Yeah, I am.”

And he was, even with the grief inside him that he knew he’d carry forever.

Tony stared at him impassively, as if trying to judge whether Steve was telling the truth, before he smiled, soft and a little crooked. “Okay,” he said with a finality that told Steve he had made his decision.

And although this had been the reason he had come out here and he didn’t want Tony to stay, “You sure?” Steve asked. 

“I’ve had nothing to do but think about this for the past few years. Kind of dulls the fear a bit when you’re like this for so long.”

He watched Tony, his brave Tony, take in a deep breath and roll back his shoulders.

“All right, just—” And for a moment, Tony seemed unsure. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t want you to see this.”

“I’ll close my eyes,” he said, and even though he was okay, even though they had had years to arrive at this moment, where they both could let go at the same time, his eyes stung. Tony always tried to protect him, even now when they reached the end.

He took a moment, taking in every inch of Tony, trying to commit to memory the exact way Tony looked, beautiful and immortal in the dying light of their last day, before holding out his hands, palms up. Tony carefully wrapped his hands around his, making sure not to go through him.

With his eyes closed, Steve could almost feel the weight of Tony’s hands in his, their softness as he brushed them in reassurance.

Something shifted in the air, atoms coming apart and rearranging almost imperceptibly, and he heard Tony suck in a shaky breath.

He imagined Tony turning into golden starlight, the same exact brilliance of the waterproof sparklers he had gifted Steve on Steve’s last birthday before he had died. The ones that he had spent months perfecting because it had rained on Steve’s birthday the year before, and all they had was lightning for fireworks.

“Hold me close, wherever you’re going,” Steve said, feeling the part of him that had kept Tony here for so long leave him and join Tony. “The rest of me will follow later.”

“Not too soon.” Steve could hear the frown in Tony’s voice. “I want you to live a long, happy life. Don’t come looking for me until you’re 120, all right?”

“You still promise to love me even with liver spots and cataracts?”

Tony laughed, and warmth glowed in Steve’s chest from the center out to hear that sound one last time, to hear no fear or sadness in it, just happiness and affection.

“I do have a thing for older men. But I mean it.” Tony’s voice sounded faded now, an echo of a memory. “Make a life for yourself here. For me.”

“I will.” And because it was the truest thing he knew and because it would be the last time in a long while until he could say it: “I love you.”

And because Tony was Tony until the end, he replied, with as much conviction as Han Solo had, “I know.” He sounded the way he always did when he couldn’t stop smiling. “And you know I love you too. So long, Steve. See you in a century.”

His words trailed off in the end, dissolving, and Steve waited a moment longer for them to be scattered by the wind, so that whatever was left of Tony would be carried up into the sky.

“See you,” he whispered, though he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.

When he opened his eyes, nighttime had fallen. Tony was gone, no trace of him in the air, but he felt calm, a sense of steadiness blanketing him. He stood there for a minute, putting his hands in his pockets as he stared at the trees and the house before him, truly empty now that Tony was gone, before walking back the way he came to where his motorcycle stood.

There was nothing left for him here except ghosts, and not even that anymore, he thought as he swung a leg over the seat and started the bike. The engine roared to life underneath him, and as he drove away, choosing to look up and ahead at the stars silent above him rather than back, he thought he could see one shine bigger and brighter than the others. Tony would be there, exploring the whole universe like he was supposed to—like Steve wanted him to.

“Fly safe, Tony,” he said softly, and with a smile, he rode out of town, out onto the highway again and into the quiet night, the skies and the road open in front of him, towards Brooklyn and the future.

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this five years ago for [890fifth](https://890fifth.tumblr.com) and brushed off the dust so I could say goodbye to it. It's not perfect, but I can let it go now and I think there's an extra poignancy to it that I'm doing so after Endgame. This doesn't fit any of the prompts I made for [Round 2 of Lights on Park Ave](https://lightsonparkave.tumblr.com/post/188095745576/the-nights-are-getting-longer-and-houses-are), but I wanted to submit this for the collection, so let's just say that the title of the Billie Eilish song prompt, "Bury a Friend," served as the final push to get this out.
> 
> This can also be seen as a sad companion fic to ["Thunder Hurried Slow"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2573882) but set in a universe parallel to that one because in that one, Steve and Tony grow up with a bunch of the others unlike here, where Steve meets Natasha and Sam in college.


End file.
